Shape and Color
by Kshar
Summary: DG. Cain. Sunlight and water.


Shape and Color

by Kshar

Disclaimer: Characters are the property of the SciFi Network and L. Frank Baum, and are used without permission.

xx

DG hears him walking up behind her and she doesn't need to turn around. She knows the sound of his measured steps like she knows what his face looks like in firelight; like she knows his silhouette from across the room. She adds another dab of color to her palette, and dips her head to one side and then the other, feeling her neck crack.

"Someone's stolen the flat brush I need," she says.

"'Good afternoon, Wyatt, how are you today?' 'I'm fine, thank you, DG, so kind of you to ask.'"

She sighs. "Hey, Tin Man. What's the what?"

"Thank you," he says, and there's a note of amusement in his voice. "The brush. Did you check where you left it last?"

She finally turns to face him and pushes a wayward strand of hair out of her face with her pinky finger. "Last time I used it I would have put it away," she says irritably, gesturing to her brush box. "Like always."

He crouches beside her to pick up the box, and a breeze ruffles through the shelter, flicking at the papers she has pinned on her easel.

"In here?" Cain asks her, and rifles through the brushes, his broad hands making them look small and impossibly fine.

"It's not there," she says.

"What does it look like?"

"It's not there. I checked."

"Humor me, DG."

She sighs, and rubs the bridge of her nose with the back of her sleeve. The light off the water has been starting to make her eyes hurt, but the prospect of going back inside is too much, so she's been here, struggling to make the lines go where she wants them and make the colors bend to her will, for long enough that the backs of her legs hurt. "Flat brush. Black handle. Half-inch wide."

He looks up from the box quizzically, and she shows him a half-inch with finger and thumb, thinking not for the first time that she needs to get more used to local terms. Maybe she needs more time with Tutor. Maybe they have adult education classes in the O.Z. Maybe she and her classmates could go out for pizza after class, and she could talk to someone who didn't bow when she walked into a room or look at her as though she was a wayward child.

"Thought you were still sketching it out," he says, and she's surprised he knows that level of detail. Although she shouldn't be, she supposes, because he pays attention to everything.

"Yeah. Well. I was still sketching, but I got tired of...of fine pencil lines, and pastels. Sometimes I need to throw some paint around."

"Sounds dangerous," he says mildly.

"Might be if I actually did it. As it is, I've been sitting here half the afternoon trying to mix colors. And worrying about getting it wrong."

"This the one?" he asks her, and she half-turns toward him to see him holding out a paintbrush. Her flat brush.

She sighs again. "I swear it wasn't there before."

"Solve your problem?"

"The immediate one, yes." DG acknowledges his help with a half-smile, and dips the flat brush into her newly mixed paint. It looks wrong; immediately wrong on the new brush in her hand and she puts it down again. She squints her eyes and looks up at the mountains in the distance, looking for clouds behind them.

"So," he says slowly. "Let me get this straight. You needed to be out here, looking at the scenery...to draw Azkadellia?"

DG wipes her fingers absently on the hem of her shirt, and then smudges one finger along a pencil line on one of the sketches pinned to the easel in front of her. The papers rustle again as she pushes them around the easel, unclipping and moving them; refastening them and frowning.

"It's not Az," she says finally. "Or not only Az."

"Ah," he says, and she hears him shifting his weight backwards on his feet. DG looks over her shoulder again to see him leant back against a post, regarding her. She shuffles backward until the back of her legs hit the swing-seat and sits. The rope twists against her weight, so she keeps her feet on the ground.

In her mind while she's been looking at the blank page she's seen the sky rent by a storm, but she can't figure out how to make it look in the face been she's drawing, the face that is Az but isn't. That is her sister's soft mouth and dark eyes, but with something else behind the line of her forehead. DG had thought she needed the look of the sky and the mountains and the water to help, but they hadn't helped, they hadn't helped at all.

"People are the hardest thing to draw," she says, and she sees him out of the corner of her eye, shaking his head, but she wants to explain. "You think you've got it just right and then you put a line in the wrong place, and...it changes their whole face, it makes them into something else." She huffs out a breath and stands again, walking back to stand in front of the blank paper, cracking the knuckles of one hand inside the other fist. "It still isn't right. It isn't true."

She hears him lean forward by the creak of the post and his footsteps again, settling right behind her. She doesn't move, but he's so close she can almost feel the puff of his breath against her hair. She unclips one of the small sketches and presses it against the wooden backing of the easel with three fingers, wondering where to place it.

"You've been working on it for weeks," he says, his voice softer and deeper when he's close to her.

"I know," she says, leaning backwards; just the smallest movement. She breathes deeply and can smell oak leaves and woodsmoke. "It seems important."

"You think it'll help you to understand," he says. She watches almost rather than feels his hand reach forward to hers. His fingers stop above the faint freckles on the back of her wrist.

"I need it," she says, almost under her breath. "I need to make it make sense." She doesn't move, hardly daring to breathe in the sudden silence. The birds have stopped singing, she thinks, or gone away.

This time when he speaks, his mouth is at her ear, close enough that she can feel the faint whisper of stubble against her flesh, and she wants to shiver but forces herself to stand quietly as he speaks. "You can't force things to fall into place, Deege."

And the paper falls off the easel onto the ground, and the breeze picks it up and carries it out into the grass, but suddenly she doesn't mind, doesn't mind at all.

xx

Feedback of any kind will be gratefully received. Thanks for reading.

Kshar

June 2008


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